Under the deal Redmond will write a cheque for $26.2 billion, inclusive of LinkedIn’s net cash. LinkedIn will retain its distinct brand, culture and independence.

Jeff Weiner will remain CEO of LinkedIn, reporting to Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. Reid Hoffman, chairman of the board, co-founder and controlling shareholder of LinkedIn, and Weiner both fully support this transaction. The transaction is expected to close this calendar year.

Despite Facebook getting all the press, LinkedIn is the world’s largest and most valuable professional network and continues to build a strong and growing business. The company has managed to get itself onto mobiles, acquired a leading online learning platform called Lynda.com to enter a new market and rolled out a new version of its Recruiter product to its enterprise customers.

It has seen a 19 percent growth year over year (YOY) to more than 433 million members worldwide.

Microsoft sees it as a way of pushing its Microsoft Office 365 and bsuiness products.

The deal is expected to close this calendar year and is subject to approval by LinkedIn’s shareholders, the satisfaction of certain regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions.

Microsoft will finance the transaction primarily through the issuance of new loan.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has met several high-profile conservative figures in US politics in a bid to convince them that he was not really fixing it so their news was not being properly presented on the social networking site.

The site has been accused of tampering with its Trending Topics feature, promoting "progressive" views and websites over content presenting views from the god-fearing American right.

Zuckerberg denied the reports - which first appeared on tech news site Gizmodo but he did say that the feature was controlled by human editors rather than a popularity algorithm.

So he invited “more than a dozen leading conservatives to talk about how we can make sure Facebook continues to be a platform for all ideas across the political spectrum.”

“Silicon Valley has a reputation for being liberal. But the Facebook community includes more than 1.6 billion people of every background and ideology - from liberal to conservative and everything in between. We've built Facebook to be a platform for all ideas. Our community's success depends on everyone feeling comfortable sharing anything they want. It doesn't make sense for our mission or our business to suppress political content or prevent anyone from seeing what matters most to them."

What Zuckerburg wanted was to place the following conservatives in one room – conspiracy nut Glenn Beck, Fox News presenter Dana "Snowden is a Traitor" Perino, Zac Moffatt, Mitt Romney's campaign bloke, Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute, Jim DeMint, president of the Heritage Foundation and Donald Trump advisor Barry Bennett.

It seems that no-one at any point decided that it would be a good idea to save the world from a pile of suck and blow up the entire building. Perhaps it was because Zuckerburg could not attract all the conservatives he wanted to his meeting, maybe Jesus told them not to be there, or they were frightened of meeting transgender people in the loos.

Matthew Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union, and former Bush campaign aide wrote in a statement: "We will not be attending this meeting. We know one meeting cannot possibly resolve all of the above mentioned issues." So showing up at no meeting at all is going to help the process start.

On Tuesday, visitors to the website were greeted with the "Something is technically wrong" including the infamous blindfolded android robot image. Twitter chose to communicate the problem via a tweet. Some users took to Facebook to complain. Yet for others, the site appears to be permanently inaccessible.

Social media networking giant Twitter has recently experienced a major outage at least 2.5 hours long and affecting at least three major European regions and parts of East Asia. Problems have been identified since 8.27GMT and are mainly focused on the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Switzerland, the UAE, Bangkok and several regions of the United States.

On Tuesday, the company said it was “working towards a resolution,” adding that the shutdowns had started around 3 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. The cause of the service disruptions is currently unknown.

Twitter administrators have noted in the company’s developer dashboard that three parts of its service are all seeing service disruption. These include "/1.1/friends/ids," "/1.1/search/tweets," and "/1.1/statuses/home_timeline." Meanwhile, stream.twitter.com was having “performance issues” but is now operating normally. User Streams also appears to be operating normally.

DownDetector.com - Twitter outage statistics, January 19, 2016

The company is not the only one to battle service outages. In January 2015, Facebook apologized after both its core Facebook service and its photo and video sharing service Instagram were taken down by hackers, prompting the hashtag “#facebookdown” and generating a cascade of Tweets, including an image of a t-shirt with the words “I survived #facebookdown.” Nevertheless, the hashtag "#facebookdown" generated a cascade of tweets, including an image of a T-shirt with the words "I survived #facebookdown." Companies such as Coca-Cola even took it as a viral marketing opportunity. More than 7,500 websites had services affected by that outage, according to Web tracking firm DynaTrace.

We don’t expect the same to happen with this Twitter incident and we wish the development team a safe, speedy and secure recovery as they recalibrate internal networks and position services back online.

On Wall Street, the company's share price is currently under $18, near its 52-week low, as company executives prepare to announce its FY2015 results in three weeks on February 10th.

Phishing attacks on Facebook, as well as other social networking sites such as Habbo are growing like topsy, according to the latest spam report from Kaspersky Lab.

In June the increase was marked at 4.07 and 6.25 per cent respectively, pushing these sites to third and fourth places in the list of those attacked most. PayPal and eBay attractmost attention from phishers in the last month, but that is because you know that the punters have money.

The volume of spam in mail traffic increased slightly compared to May and averaged 83.3 per cent. The most popular topics for cybercriminals to hook spam on were Osama bin Laden’s death, the last Harry Potter movie and the anniversary of the death pop has-been, with an interest in drugs and children, Michael Jackson

Kaspersky Lab predict a surge in spam linked to Google+ after signs that spammers have begun exploiting the growing interest in the new social network. Maria Namestnikova, Senior Spam Analyst at Kaspersky Lab is expecting an increase in unsolicited emails exploiting the new Google social network. They will most likely contain both phishing links and malicious code.

There was a slight decrease in the amount of malware blocked in mail traffic in June. Malicious files were found in 3.8 per cent of all emails, a decrease of 0.3 per cent compared with the previous month. There were no major changes to the Top 10 countries where mail antivirus detected malware most frequently. Italy moved up from sixth to fourth place following an increase of 1.5 per cent. Trojan-Spy.HTML.Fraud.gen still occupied first place among the Top 10 malicious programs distributed via mail traffic.

Meanwhile one in three of all English-language spam is fraudulent and was either sent with the intention of extorting money from users or contained a malicious attachment or link to malicious code. Pharmaceutical spam was the second most popular category. Offers of quick earnings and dubious personal loans, various goods and services along with fake designer goods were among the other most prominent categories of spam in June.

Social notworking browser RockMelt, which is built around Facebook, realtime feeds, and faster search has gone into public beta.

The browser has been developed by Netscape founder Marc Andreessen and got fairly mixed reviews. Ironically the only way you could test it was to have a friend who was a beta user sent you an invite. Now after more than 15 updates and months of testing with a few hundred thousand active users, anyone can give it a go.

RockMelt is Chrome where extensions are forced on you. There is a box with all of your Facebook friends who are online with presence indicators, and another rail on the right with all your RSS feeds, Twitter and Gmail accounts, and custom apps. We gave it a go and it worked as a much more useful interface for a heavy Facebook session.

We did not see how it worked with games and apps, because we don't play them on Facebook, as we have a life. It does work with Twitter too.

The European Commission is hatching out a legal plan which will allow every citizen to be forgotten. EU data protection rules are to be updated to take into account the popularity of digital networking sites where people share photographs or personal details that can haunt them when they become distributed online.

Viviane Reding, Europe's rights commissioner, said the world of data protection had been transformed by popular new technologies in the last 15 years. She said that Internet users must have effective control of what they put online and be able to correct, withdraw or delete it at will. If you want to permanently delete your profile on a social networking site it should be easy and the right to be forgotten is essential in today's digital world.

The commission will require new legislation clarifying and strengthening the rules on consent to allow web users to stop anyone from gathering information about them without having to make complicated adjustments to their internet browsers.

During its music-centric event in San Francisco, California on Wednesday morning, Apple announced its plans to enter the social networking realm as an effort to democratize the process of discovering and sharing music with friends over iTunes.

The new service, named Ping, is a proprietary web service bundled within the new iTunes 10 software update that allows a user to follow both friends and artists to find new music and concert tours. Apple CEO Steve Jobs remarked during the 10am live conference that the new service “is sort of like Facebook and Twitter meeting iTunes. It is not Facebook. It is not Twitter. It is something else we've come up with. It's all about music."

What's new in iTunes 10

Ping is accessible to anyone with an iTunes account upon installing the new software update. Like Facebook, Apple’s social networking service publicly lists every user who has clicked the “Like” button on a status comment, provided that the user has configured their account settings to allow public content sharing. Ping will have settings for privacy as well, giving users the option to approve and reject followers at will.

Ping live feed user interface in iTunes 10

Ping profile signup page in iTunes 10

During his keynote, Jobs also unveiled a new iTunes logo, which does not include an image of a CD on it due to the idea that compressed MP3-quality music sales on iTunes are soon expected to overtake CD sale. While the idea of millions of music consumers around the globe never experiencing or respecting the clarity of lossless CD-quality audio makes us shriek in disgust, we are inclined to believe that CD prices might regress, giving the handful of audiophiles like ourselves an incentive to purchase even more CDs than ever before.

In perspective, iTunes has always been a central hub for Apple, bringing together computing and portable entertainment devices like the Mac, Macbook, iPod, iPhone and iPad, with content in the form of music, movies, TV shows, apps and books. While the utility of content availability is more or less complete on the computing side of the human-computer interaction (HCI) spectrum, a major component gone missing have been the social networking mechanisms that connect people with that content.

In this regard, Ping serves to bridge the gap between what iTunes has to offer and the strong and weak ties between personal friendship circles. On the social end, it similarities to Facebook, but the main difference is that it’s integrated into the shell of a bigger program, namely iTunes. Unfortunately, Apple has not announced a purely cloud-based implementation of the new service, and we have reason to believe that this decision could be the result of an infamous belief held in the company’s corporate culture – control over proprietary products and services.

Let’s face it, the social networking services popular on the Internet of 2010 are based on the core foundations of utility infrastructure, distributed server networks, open standards and cloud-based data distribution. If Apple truly wanted to release an music-oriented social network that was open ended, Steve Jobs would have announced a web accessible front-end during the keynote on Wednesday morning.

While we don’t expect many Ping users to constantly leave iTunes open on their computers from system startup to the end of the day in to socialize about music, we believe the service will be used no more than the amount of time used for browsing and purchasing content on the iTunes store. If anything, Ping will supplement the buying process by invoking stronger inclinations to purchase content based on the recommendations of friends and followers.